Amazon Free App Of The Day Isn't Necessarily Good For The Developer

I think most of us are the same when it comes to apps. We will pay for some of them if they look really cool, but mostly we want free apps. This is what Android users tend to keep an eye on the Amazon Free App of the Day being offered daily since the apps are free for the single day only. The deal seems like good exposure, but one developer has found that being selected for the featured promotion wasn't a good thing at all.

ShiftyJelly reports that its app Pocket Casts was chosen as the free app of the day and since Amazon made no money, it was paid no money for its app. The devs agreed to the promotion anyway in hopes of making some money on the back end after the free deal was over during the main page 14-day promotion. The day Pocket Casts was free Amazon gave away 101,491 copies of the app and had the app sold at the normal 20% cut the dev would have earned $54,80.14 that single day.

Instead they earned nothing, they were then angered to see that Amazon slashed the price of the app to 99 cents during the promotion period costing the developers money again. After the promotion was done sales of the app went back to the level before the promotion leaving them with no lingering benefit from being selected. In fact, ShiftyJelly notes that the influx of new free users meant that they had to go and purchase more server hardware actually costing them money to promote the Amazon Appstore.

[via Android Community]